Drops of Memory

Chapter - 1: Inheritance in Air

"We need to rework the last sample," Chloe said. "The bergamot is imbalanced. It crossed the threshold - 5%, not 2.5."

Lina frowned, not at the mistake, but at the implication. "That's not a shift. That's a fracture."

"It's worse," Chloe added. "It didn't just smell wrong. It behaved wrong."

Phoebe didn't say a word, but stood close enough that Chloe could feel the calm she wasn't admitting she needed.

"Show me," Lina said.

Chloe nodded, unstoppered the vial, and inhaled.

The scent rose, loud, bright and unrefined, like emotion unhinged from body.

Something was missing. Something her father would've never let happen.

She closed her eyes.

The air trembled.

Something had shifted - in the formula, and in her.

Lina slid the glass plate under the light. The chromatograph lines glowed faintly, like a fractured pulse.

"It's not just proportion," she murmured. "The binding failed."

Chloe already knew. She'd seen it in her head before she saw it on the plate, the moment the reaction broke its precision.

At 2.5%, the bergamot molecule - limonene - had done what it was designed to do: bind softly to serotonin receptors, diffuse slowly, whisper calm into the nervous system.

She could draw it perfectly, even now:

But at 5.0% - everything flipped. Limonene flooded the system too fast. Instead of binding quietly, it overrode. The nervous system didn't soothe - it braced.

That was the chain reaction.

The emotional inversion.

Calm into alertness. Balance into tension.

The same molecule. A different truth.

She felt it in her chest now, the way her father used to say:

"A perfume isn't just what you put in. It's what the body does with it."

She uncapped her pen and drew the curve out by memory - the slope that was supposed to fall gently downward over time, but instead spiked.

"It's not perfume anymore," she said, voice low.

"It's a warning."

Phoebe watched her, the way people watch someone on the edge of naming a ghost.

Lina said nothing. She didn't have to.

The reaction was visible on the page.

Visible in Chloe, too.

Her father never let her cross that line.

But he wasn't here now.

Chloe shut the door behind her and sat alone in her office, the scent of her failed formula still clinging to her skin. She had crossed the line - 5.0% - and no one else in that building would ever understand why it hurt. To them, it was just another batch. But Chloe knew. She knew what it meant to push something too far, to ask a molecule to do more than it was meant to carry. She knew the smell of pain.

She stared at the framed photograph on her desk - her mother, Roxanne. Always smiling. Now always unreachable.

"Mama, dad will be here soon. Please wake up."

She remembered being nine, in the hospital room that smelled like bleach and wilted flowers. She remembered the sound of every car that pulled into the parking lot. Every one that wasn't him.

Her mother died before he came.

"Miss, your father is in South America. He hasn't been picking up calls."

That line still felt like a fracture - one she'd grown up around, one she'd built a whole life on top of.

Now, at 22, she was successful. Acclaimed. Independent. She shouldn't have been crying in her own office over a man who hadn't shown up when she needed him most.

But grief is not a scent you can refuse. It rises anyway.

Phoebe came in quietly, her footsteps soft, the smell of fig and sandalwood trailing her like a touch.

"Babe, what happened?" she whispered, wrapping her arms around Chloe from behind.

Chloe didn't answer at first. She just breathed in, slowly, as if the world was dissolving.

"He called me today."

Phoebe stilled. "After all these years?"

Chloe nodded, eyes refusing to blink.

"You talked. Right?"

"No," she said. "I didn't pick up."

The silence after that was its own perfume - heavy, suspended, unsweetened.

Then her phone rang again.

"Chloe Vardhan?" a voice asked.

"Yes," she replied.

"I am your father's lawyer. I'm sorry to inform you... your father is no more."